Re: AmericanaramA Festival of Music Tour feat. Bob Dylan, Wilco, MMJ

Bob Weir: 5:30-6:05
MMJ: 6:15-7:25
Wilco: 7:55-9:05
Dylan: 9:30-11:05

My expectations for Dylan were set extremely low, and he actually exceeded those expectations, so that was nice. He sounds like he does on Tempest, plus he played a lot from that album. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is one of my favorite Dylan songs, I wish he would sing it somewhat closer to the version that I know and love. I expected that though. He sounded good on the harmonica :/

I'm glad I got to see him, but I will probably not make an effort to go see him again.

The highlight of the night for me was Wilco's "One Sunday Morning" into "The Art of Almost" into Bob Weir joining them for an extended jam of "Dark Star" into "California Stars" back into "Dark Star." Twas quite the jam.

Re: AmericanaramA Festival of Music Tour feat. Bob Dylan, Wilco, MMJ

Last night's review is less than glowing:

By: Ben Rayner Pop Music Critic, Published on Tue Jul 16 2013

3 stars
Bob Dylan’s “Americanarama Festival of Music” date with Wilco, My Morning Jacket and Richard Thompson at the Molson Amphitheatre on Monday night presented itself as an easy, rammed-to-the-back-fences slam dunk.
Nevertheless, while by no means an apparent commercial disaster, it was met with a surprising number of empty perches in the stands and a substantial amount of breathing room on the lawn despite the heavy bang-for-buck ratio offered by reasonable ticket prices in the $50-$90 range.
The weak link? It might have been Bob Dylan.
The Toronto chapter of the cult of Wilco was sufficiently numbered to fill the 2,750-seat Massey Hall for a couple of nights on the band’s tour behind The Whole Love in September of 2011, after all, and My Morning Jacket’s local following by now easily tests the bounds of a 2,000-plus venue such as Kool Haus. And while Thompson’s esteemed 45-year career has been bold enough to consistently relegate him to the informed fringes of the mainstream, the British singer, songwriter and guitar virtuoso must still be good to pull somewhere in the upward neighbourhood of 500 bodies in this town.
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A conservative estimate would, thus, peg the potential Toronto audience for Americanarama at least a good one-third of the amphitheatre’s 16,000-person capacity before Bob Dylan, the 72-year-old living legend and headliner around which the roving mini-festival is built, even entered into the picture. Dylan, one would think, should top that crowd up nicely.
Instead, he succeeded in thinning the ranks in much the same way he cleared out a substantial amount of the crowd at the Air Canada Centre during his last tour stop in Toronto last November — by bloody mindedly playing the crank and serving up an uncompromising mix of rambling recent numbers rendered in the jump-blues vein and thoroughly (read: almost unrecognizably) worked-over catalogue standards such as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Blind Willie McTell” and a set-concluding grind on “Blowin’ In the Wind.”
Thursday, Nov 15, 2012:Bob Dylan’s unintelligible performance at ACC leaves fans, critic frustrated
Newer tunes from last year’s Tempest album like “Early Roman Kings” and the choogling “Duquesne Whistle” from were delivered with a satisfying amount of creepy, guttural pep by Dylan and a disciplined band bolstered for the night by Toronto guitarist non pareil Colin Linden — who, according to a couple of well-placed music-industry sources in the crowd, might be sticking with the tour for the duration in place of the recently dismissed Duke Robillard — while the odd classic such as “Tangled Up in Blue” or “All Along the Watchtower” (powerful enough on Monday to inspire a young fan next to me to start dancing the “running man”) was deployed in sufficiently faithful form to win the crowd over instantly instead of leaving it puzzled until it maybe got a handle on whatever lyrics were being wheezed forth from the stage.

That’s Dylan’s thing and been his thing for a long time, probably since before he went “electric” at Newport, and I appreciate that the man’s gotta keep the onstage proceedings interesting to himself after some 50 years of dogged touring, but the slow bits between the flashes of brilliance — or a rare moment of festival charity like Monday’s late-set gang rendering of Joan Baez’s “O What a Beautiful City” with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James — are a serious drain and do an exceedingly good job of driving people to the exits. The law of diminishing returns would explain why he’s not as stable an attraction as he was in the past.
Granted, scheduling such a well-stacked bill better suited to a lazy weekend afternoon-into-evening sprawl on a Monday night definitely worked against it. Thompson’s unforgiving 5:30 time slot was all but a write-off for many ticketholders who had to report to work that day — including those of us who earn our living attending concerts — and if your cross-town public-transit nightmares were anything like mine, you likely missed out on a good chunk of My Morning Jacket’s Kentucky-fried, beyond-Southern-rock expansionism, too.
Wilco, thus, had the opportunity to grab the spotlight in the undercard position on the bill and did it quite capably.
The band flaunted its chops by inviting Thompson onstage for a mammoth assault on his formative folk-pop combo Fairport Convention’s “Sloth” that turned into a scorching Thompson-vs.-Nels Cline guitar duo. Tweedy graciously renamed the night “Canadianarama” and invited hometown hero Leslie Feist onstage to duet on “You and I” and a fluttering version of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” that — if my friend Stuart Henderson’s tweets are accurate — approximated an old Fairport Convention cover of the same that featured Sandy Denny. Then, after killing it with Being There’s delightful “I Got You (At the End of the Century),” Wilco killed it further by joining with members of My Morning Jacket for an appropriately ragged run at Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl.”
Crowd-pleasing? You bet. Wilco’s done that tune a few times on this tour but you got the impression they’d added it to the setlist with the intent of watching it eventually detonate properly over a Canadian crowd. Sometimes it’s better to throw your audience a bone than to beat it baffled.

Re: AmericanaramA Festival of Music Tour feat. Bob Dylan, Wilco, MMJ

The Irvine show last night was a great, star-studded experience from my perspective.

Highlights:

-Wilco brought out Nancy Sinatra to perform "Bang Bang" and "These Boots are Made for Walkin'." This absolutely brought the house down, and I admittedly flipped into schoolgirl mode when Nels Cline's stepped on his tremolo pedal and started playing the "Bang Bang" riff.

[Photo via @nancysinatra]

-My Morning Jacket sleighed as usual, playing a "best of"/covers set that was a bit of a cock-tease for those who have seen their full-length sets. Jackson Browne accompanied MMJ for one of his own songs, plus a cover of Dylan's "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You."

-The singer from Dawes sang the second verse of "Wonderful" with MMJ.

-"California Stars" turned into a Bonnaroo-worthy Superjam, as Wilco was joined by Jackson Browne, Ryan Bingham, "some of the My Morning Jackets" (in Jeff Tweedy's words), and some other dudes on lap steel and fiddle. (Tweedy: "This song was written for you...some 80 years ago.")

-With my curbed expectations, I found Dylan's set surprisingly enjoyable, even if the firelamp deco made me feel like I was dining at PF Chang's. About halfway through, the boredom kicked in via an overall samey-ness of swingy, smoky, growly Americana. I'll give him this, though: he hasn't turned into complete state-fair fodder. Much like his former self, of which he is now a shell, Dylan does what the fuck he wants.

Setlists:

My Morning Jacket

Circuital
It Beats 4 U
First Light
The Way That He Sings
Off the Record
Wonderful (with Taylor Goldsmith)
Late for the Sky (Jackson Browne cover, with JB)
Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You (Bob Dylan cover, with JB)
Victory Dance
Wordless Chorus
Don't Do It (The Band cover, with Ryan Bingham)
Gideon

Wilco

At My Window Sad and Lonely
You Are My Face
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
Art of Almost
Bang Bang (with Nancy Sinatra)
These Boots Are Made For Walkin' (with Nancy Sinatra)
Happy Birthday (to their soundman)
When You Wake Up Feeling Old (at the request of their soundman, the birthday boy)
Impossible Germany
Born Alone
New Madrid (Uncle Tupelo cover)
Forget the Flowers
California Stars (with Jackson Brown, et al)
Heavy Metal Drummer (requested by Nancy Sinatra; Tweedy charmingly forgot the first verse and started the song over)
Casino Queen (with Ryan Bingham)
Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young cover, with MMJ)

Re: AmericanaramA Festival of Music Tour feat. Bob Dylan, Wilco, MMJ

Re: AmericanaramA Festival of Music Tour feat. Bob Dylan, Wilco, MMJ

Originally Posted by roboto

Dylan made wilco and mmj look like amateur hour tonight . Goosebumps show , what a legend.

Really? I and everyone near me and like all online reviews think the exact opposite. Yes he's a legend but he just doesn't put on a good show, he has no voice, or stage presence, or connection with the audience...

Re: AmericanaramA Festival of Music Tour feat. Bob Dylan, Wilco, MMJ

I spotted Nels Cline this morning before he left for the airport and he said they had a lot of fun last night. Said they tried some different things and he thought they came out well but hoped the audience was into it. Super nice guy.